I'm making fast progress with msgpad now. I have two bugs to sort out and I should be ready to bring in many more beta testers.
One of the bugs is an issue with Internet Explorer 6 not displaying msgpad correctly. It's pretty annoying seeing as Opera 8.5 and FireFox 1.5 render the pages fine. The pages are also XHTML strict valid.
The other bug is boring and is related to timezone offsets on the server.
I was able to improve the speed of a common call today by simply pre-loading data rather than lazy loading. I suspect there are more of these easy wins laying around the place.
I've also taken a peek at msgpad through Opera's small screen rendering and it's pretty darn nice. It's easy to get out of bed each day when you're working with infrastructure as powerful, and ingenius as the web standards!